The variety of phishing emails acquired by Australians surged by 30% final yr, new analysis by safety agency Abnormal Security has discovered. Cybercriminals have more and more focused the Asia-Pacific area, partly as a result of it’s turning into a bigger participant in essential industries like knowledge centres and telecoms.
For APAC as a complete, credential phishing assaults rose by 30.5% between 2023 and 2024, in keeping with the analysis. New Zealand noticed a 30% rise, whereas for Japan and Singapore, it was 37%. Out of all of the kinds of superior electronic mail assaults, together with enterprise electronic mail compromise and malware deployment, phishing noticed the most important enhance.
“The surge in attack volume across the APAC region can likely be attributed to several factors, including the strategic significance of its countries as epicentres for trade, finance, and defence,” stated Tim Bentley, Vice President of APJ at Abnormal Security stated in a press launch.
“This makes organisations in the region attractive targets for complex email campaigns designed to exploit economic dynamics, disrupt essential industries, and steal sensitive data.”
SEE: 80% of Critical National Infrastructure Companies Experienced an Email Security Breach in Last Year
Between 2023 and 2024, the median month-to-month charge of all superior electronic mail assaults rose by 26.9% throughout all of APAC, together with Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore. This encompassed a 16% enhance from Q1 to Q2 2024, and a 20% enhance from Q2 to Q3.
While phishing was the dominant assault kind, BEC assaults — together with govt impersonation and fee fraud — additionally grew by 6% year-over-year in APAC. According to Abnormal Security, the typical price related to one profitable BEC assault exceeded USD $137,000 in 2023.
Australia’s cyber immaturity and the AI increase are inflicting an ideal storm
The information that Australia is liable to cyber assault is just not completely new. A Rubrik survey from final yr discovered that Australian organisations reported the highest charge of information breaches in contrast with international markets in 2023.
Antoine Le Tard, vice chairman – of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Rubrik, stated on the time that Australia was a favorite goal partly as a result of the nation “is a mature market and early adopter of cloud and enterprise security technologies,” and due to this fact could have prioritised speedy deployment over complete safety.
At a nationwide stage, the strategy to cyber safety has been a bit gradual off the mark. The Australian Signals Directorate reported that solely 15% of presidency companies achieved the minimal stage of cyber safety in 2024 — a pointy decline from 25% in 2023. Such entities have additionally confirmed reluctant to undertake passkey authentication strategies, stemming from cyber safety maturity within the public sector and the notion that implementing it’s complicated.
There can be the AI issue, which is influencing the safety panorama globally. The ease of entry to chatbots, each common and jailbroken for nefarious functions, makes it quicker to generate materials for phishing emails and lowers the barrier to entry, as no technical information is required to make use of them. AI-powered chatbots have been named one among 2025’s high AI threats for Australian cyber professionals, for that cause.
SEE: Impacts of AI on Cyber Security Landscape
The variety of BEC assaults detected by safety agency Vipre within the second quarter of 2024 was 20% greater than the identical interval in 2023 — and two-fifths of them have been generated by AI. In June, HP intercepted an electronic mail marketing campaign spreading malware within the wild with a script that “was highly likely to have been written with the help of GenAI.”
Furthermore, adversaries have begun utilizing AI chatbots to construct belief with victims and finally rip-off them. The method mimics how an enterprise could use AI to mix human-driven interplay with the AI chatbot to interact and “convert” an individual.